In recent years, various information recording media, such as magnetic recording media, thermal recording media, and optical recording media, have been developed and put to practical use. The present inventors have hitherto made studies on optical, physico-chemical, or electric characteristics of liquid crystal materials, and, up to now, have proposed a liquid crystal charge-transport material which focuses on charge-transport properties of a specific liquid crystal system (for example, Japanese Patent Application No. 76820/1998).
The present invention has been made as a result of attention to a property of a liquid crystal material such that the charge-transport properties of the liquid crystal material are stably varied upon phase transfer between a plurality of liquid crystal phases, and it is an object of the present invention to provide a novel information recording medium which records information upon the application of thermal energy and reads the recorded information by detecting the value of photoelectric current generated by light applied to an information recorded portion and, in addition, can realize multi-valued information recording or analog information recording.